ABSTRACT
There is a view that civil society linkage in the Commonwealth preceded the multilateral Commonwealth that we know at the start of the twenty-first century.1 It is a matter of record, for instance, that the Royal Commonwealth Society traces its origin to 1868;2 the Commonwealth Press Union to 1909;3 the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association to 1911; the Commonwealth Forestry Association to 1921; and the Commonwealth Games to 1930. The Commonwealth Secretariat, by contrast, was born in 1965 – 18 years after the independence of the South Asian member-states; the Commonwealth Foundation, the intergovernmental body which has a special status as a promoter of and interlocutor for civil society, commenced operations the year after.
